Trivia: Received his first guitar at age 9 as a gift from his mother. Signed a 10-album deal with Columbia in June 1972 at the age of 22 after auditioning for legendary music executive John Hammond, who also discovered Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan. First two albums, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (1973) and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle (1973), didn't sell particularly well at first, but the buzz about his third, Born to Run (1975), was so great that he was famously on the covers of both Time and Newsweek the same week in October 1975. Was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999. Was part of the inaugural class inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2008. Made his first arena appearance at the Spectrum in Philadelphia in 1973, opening for the band Chicago. He played there a total of 35 times, which included performances in the spring and fall of 2009, the final year the Spectrum held events before its demolition. Was one of the honorees at the 2009 Kennedy Center Honors. Is often a surprise guest at the annual Asbury Park, NJ, Light of Day concerts, which raise money to battle Parkinson's disease. In 2010, released The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story, which included a reissue of his 1978 album, previously unreleased outtakes, a documentary about making the album and DVDs of live performances. Helped E Street Band guitarist Steven Van Zandt celebrate the ninth anniversary of Little Steven's Underground Garage radio show by making his debut appearance on the show in April 2011.

Trivia: In tandem with John Lennon, musician Paul McCartney is responsible for composing most of the songs in the nine-year history of the Beatles. While still a member of the group, McCartney wrote the score for the 1966 film The Family Way; it would be his last solo gig until the Beatles' breakup in 1970. So prolific and popular was McCartney in his post-Beatles years that it became a standard joke amongst post-postwar kids to query "You mean that Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?" Also grist for the humor mill was McCartney's incredible wealth; his legal ownership of virtually every song ever written (including such state anthems as "On Wisconsin"); and the strict vegetarian edicts of his wife and business partner Linda Eastman McCartney. Paul McCartney has also kept active in the film world, penning the theme for the 1973 James Bond flick Live And Let Die, and producing, scoring and acting in the 1984 vanity project Give My Regards to Broad Street, in which viewers were offered the unlikely premise that McCartney would face bankruptcy if he didn't locate a lost record album.

Trivia: Best known for his blockbuster HBO crime drama series The Sopranos, television multihyphenate David Chase (born David DeCesare) grew up, like his lead characters, in an Italian-American family in New Jersey. An only child, Chase discovered an inveterate propensity for storytelling and an immense love of cinema -- particularly gangster films -- at an early age, and reportedly spent countless hours in matinees. A taste of film production at the esteemed School for Visual Arts in New York introduced Chase to his life's calling; wanting more, he promptly abandoned his planned career as a rock drummer, headed to California, and enrolled in Stanford University's graduate-level film program, where he gravitated more to screenwriting than to hands-on production. After graduation, Chase established himself as a much sought-after scenarist with a marked gift for psychologically multilayered scripts that evinced unusual intensity -- evident via his work on such series programs as Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The Rockford Files, I'll Fly Away, and Northern Exposure (the latter two done for Joshua Brand and John Falsey) and on the multi-award-winning telemovie Off the Minnesota Strip (1980), directed by Lamont Johnson. The Sopranos, however, truly marked Chase's breakthrough. An ensemble psychodrama about a family of Jersey mobsters, the program springboarded to a large degree from the sociopathic psyche of the main character, mafia don Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), revealed during the mobster's numerous therapy sessions on the "couch." Nevertheless, in true ensemble fashion, Chase also crafted an idiosyncratic and immensely colorful group of supporting characters and arced them deliberately and calculatedly as the seasons rolled on. When the program finally wrapped, in mid-2007, audiences delivered a somewhat mixed response to its finale (which denied viewers any concrete resolution to the storyline, and abruptly ended with a cut to black in what seemed like the middle of a scene), but it had many staunch defenders. The Sopranos, of course, turned Chase into one of the hottest writers in Hollywood; meanwhile, speculation flourished about the series creator's next endeavor, with scattered suggestions and rumors of his possible involvement in big-screen projects.

Trivia: Well-known for his pivotal role in the popular HBO series The Sopranos, it will probably come as no surprise to many that some of Pastore's earliest roles were in such films as the Italian wedding comedy True Love (1989) and Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas.Born in 1946, Pastore was a well-known nightclub manager in New York for 20 years before friends Kevin and Matt Dillon convinced him to consider a career in acting. Soon taking acting lessons and turning up in community theater productions, Pastore made his feature debut in the heavy metal horror fiasco Black Roses before gaining ground on the familiar roles that would follow him through to his breakthrough success on The Sopranos. Along the way to that success, Pastore would turn up in numerous popular films including Awakenings (1990), Carlito's Way (1993), and the 1997 television miniseries The Last Don.

Trivia: The lead singer of politically-charged Irish band U2 since 1977, Bono's involvement with the movies has been mostly musical. Combining music and politics, Bono took part in Bob Geldof's Do They Know It's Christmas (1984) project to combat famine in Africa, and the anti-South African apartheid documentary Sun City - Artists United Against Apartheid (1985). Bono's primary 1980s onscreen appearance, though, was the concert documentary U2: Rattle and Hum (1988). Shot during the apex of the band's success with their hit album The Joshua Tree (1987), U2: Rattle and Hum delved into the band's admiration for rock's pioneers along with presenting performance footage from their Joshua Tree American tour. Since then, Bono (with and without his bandmates) has worked regularly with German director Wim Wenders, contributing songs to the soundtracks of the futurist road movie Until the End of the World (1991), and the Wings of Desire (1987) sequel Faraway, So Close! (1993), and serving as one of the producers, writers, and composers for Million Dollar Hotel (2000). Harking back to the Irish politics that drove their 1983 album War, Bono and U2 contributed a song to In the Name of the Father (1993). Bono also appeared onscreen as himself in Rattle and Hum director Phil Joanou's Entropy (1999) and Wender's aforementioned Million Dollar Hotel. He contributed a song to the soundtrack of Martin Scorsese's 2002 epic Gangs of New York, and appeared regularly in documentaries about various musicians. In 2007 he played Dr. Robert in Julie Taymor's Across the Universe, and that same year U2 made a 3D concert film. He would reteam with Taymor for the ill-fated Broadway Musical Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark which became allegedly the most expensive production in history before finally opening on Broadway.

Trivia: Innovative pop artist Peter Gabriel, whose major hits include "Solsbury Hill," "Sledgehammer," and "Big Time," has been the subject of several concert and rock videos. The former lead singer for the '70s progressive rock group Genesis has also penned distinctive scores for such films as Birdy (1984) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).

Trivia: Ruben Blades is a man of diverse talents. A driving force in popularizing salsa music internationally and a politician for the people of his native Panama, he is also a noted actor of stage and screen. Blades is the son of a percussionist-turned-detective and a singer/radio performer. Following studies in political science and law at Panama's Universidad Nacional, Blades worked at the Bank of Panama as a lawyer. Later he obtained a master's in law from Harvard. Many years after that, he returned to the Ivy League school to earn a doctorate in international law. Blades had been involved in music since the late '50s, but established himself as a musical powerhouse during the '70s and early '80s. He began his career in films, first as a composer of soundtracks and a songwriter in the early '80s. He made his debut as an actor in The Last Flight (1982), but it was not until he appeared in the semi-autobiographical docudrama Crossover Dreams (1985), which he co-wrote and starred in, that Blades became well known. Subsequent film appearances have included The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), The Two Jakes (1990), Mo' Better Blues (1990), and Devil's Own (1997). In 1994, Blades ran for the Panamanian presidency and though he lost, garnered over 20 percent of the vote.

Trivia: Got his first guitar at age 12; also plays piano, bass, drums, trumpet, saxophone and accordion. Says he played in 30-40 bands before joining Bon Jovi. Received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Kean University in 2004. Was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2009. Cocreated the clothing line White Trash Beautiful with designer Nikki Lund in 2010.